This doesn’t exactly fit this blog as it has to do with my actual life, not my media/info intake life, but it turns out with 1.3 million websites, I don’t actually have a place to write about my actual life, wouldn’t you know? So it’s going here.
I was asked a question today that sort of required me calling myself an East or West Coaster. I don’t know how spending much of my life in Phoenix should be characterized.
What I generally say is that living in Phoenix is like living in a lunar outpost. It’s one of those glib statements that is, nevertheless, utterly true.
I just came back to town for the first time in four years. Most of the seven years I spent here as an adult were lost to a light fog of depression or confusion, so I really didn’t actually experience the place, not fully anyway.
For the first few days I was home, it just felt kind of awful, so hot and bright and flat. No shadows, no hills, no refuge. I thought, “No wonder I was stunned into a stupor.”
But tonight driving home at night from a friend’s house, I sensed something, some kind of underlying electrical nerve center of the town, some kind of energy, almost glamorous and sexy underneath the chain stores and super-wide streets and I realized that what is awful about this town is also what could make you fall in love with it and it is (apologize in advance for this hyperbolic melodrama, but it is) America.
